According to the ninth national reading survey conducted this year, people's contact rate of digital reading in 2011 was 5.8 percentage points higher than that in 2010, an increase of 17.7 percent. According to data from Analysys, the market volume of the digital publishing industry has been growing at an annual rate of more than 30 percent, with mobile phone publishing accounting for one third of the output value, making it the fastest-growing sector of the industry. China's digital publishing is entering a phase of explosive growth; meanwhile, mobile phone reading and electronic books are also thriving.
Platform competition to quality readings
Now, more and more people are using digital reading to kill time when they are traveling and replenish their knowledge. Users of China Telecom Surfing are the first to access the digital versions of Mo Yan's books, and Tong Xin, one of these users and a white collar in Hangzhou, always takes out her mobile phone and does some reading on it when she communes between home and work on the bus. "Last year, I bought a digital reader last year when they were very cheap, but I still enjoy reading on my mobile phone more", said Tong Xin.
Digital readers in China waged a bloody price war in 2011. In March 2011, digital reading software developer Duokan and hardware manufacturers Aigo and Baidu released the digital reader Baikan, priced at RMB 999 Yuan; in April, the price of Hanvon dropped from RMB 990 Yuan to RMB 599 Yuan; in May, the Bambook, which was said to cost RMB 1,300 Yuan to make, was sold at RMB 499 Yuan. "In the USA, they have made the hardware and established the platform, and are competing for contents, but in China, we are still lingering on the path from hardware to platform", Sun Peilin, an analyst with Analysys, commented on the digital reading industry at that time.
If in 2011 the digital reading market in China was characterized by platform competition, in 2012, digital reading enterprises have attached more importance to attracting users by contents. Since the beginning of this year, terminal manufacturers, mobile operators, publishers and internet enterprises have all started to make vigorous effort to create digital reading contents. On May 31, the Duokan's online reading store, which advocates quality reading, went live, the number of its books increasing from 79 to more than 800 in a short period of half a year. On July 25, 2012, Dangdang released the electronic reader Doucon that can access Dangdang's online book store through 3G network or WiFi. Surfing's segmented product "Surfing audio books" now possesses 50,000 hours of audio resource. "Currently, not only traditional publishing organizations and media companies are going through digitalization transformation, but also internet companies and ecommerce companies are getting involved, and even telecommunication operators have joined in", said Xiao Wei, general manager of Surfing Reading.
"Today, we have entered the eBook 2.0 era. Now, we just can't transform any content indiscriminately into electronic files and ignore the feelings of the readers. We need to attach importance to 'eBook marketing', to consider segmented markets and the needs of reading experience of the audience, and give more thoughts to the presentation and presentation technologies of the contents", said Li Biao, vice president of Objectiva Software Company, a digital reading technology service provider.
Copyrights awareness is changing
With the undercurrent competition of digital reading platform, copyrights awareness of digital reading in 2012 has also been changing. "In January this year, CITIC Press Corporation published the 36 Rules of Entrepreneurship; in April, CSBOOKY published The 60-something Backpackers; and in October, JSWH published the Summer Formula. More and more quality books are now published in paper edition and electronic edition simultaneously", said Hu Xiaodong, vice president of Duokan, "This reflects that copyrights holders' awareness for electronic books is changing". It is learned that in November the electronic editions of Report of the 18th CPC National Congress, The Constitution of the Communist Party of China, and 18th CPC National Congress Documents Collection were published online at the same time as their paper editions.
Loose licensing, opaque settlement mechanism, and low-quality making used to be causes that inhibited copyrights holders to produce electronic version of books. As digital reading enterprises are attaching more importance to the design and making of contents, publishers are developing willingness to work with digital reading service providers. Jin Gengda from Zhejiang University Press said that: "Currently, Zhejiang University Press has more than 1,000 books in the digital reading domain. Although revenue of digital publishing accounts for only 10 percent of ZUP's total revenue, we think highly of the potential of digital reading in promoting quality reading and green reading. Electronic book is still in its incubation phase now".
Hu Xiaodong believes that high-quality making of contents will not only increase publishers' interest in working with digital reading service providers, but also drive the overall development of the industrial chain. "At present, resources that publishers are willing to share with us are high-quality best-selling and long-term popular books. By the end of 2013, Duokan will have 10,000 high-quality electronic books". Hu Xiaodong is fully confident about the future prospects of the digital reading industry.
According to statistics, China's digital publishing industry achieved operation revenue of RMB 137.79 billion Yuan in 2011, 31 percent more than that of 2010 and accounting for 10 percent of the RMB 1.46 trillion Yuan of the publishing industry. Besides, a fact that shall not be ignored is that: in 2011, the total income of online magazines, electronic books and digital newspaper was RMB 2.834 billion Yuan, accounting for only 2.06 percent of the digital publishing industry. This means that the traditional publishing industry that focus on contents still have huge development potentials in the digital publishing trend.
By Tan Xin